McGoohan, whose career involved stage, screen and TV, died Tuesday at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica after a short illness, said Cleve Landsberg, McGoohan's son-in-law. The family did not provide further details.
It was the height of James Bond mania in 1965 when McGoohan showed up on American TV screens in Secret Agent, a British-produced series in which he played John Drake, a special security agent working as a spy for the British government.
The hourlong series, which ran on CBS until 1966, was an expanded version of Danger Man, a short-lived, half-hour series on CBS in 1961 in which McGoohan played the same character.
But it was McGoohan's next British-produced series, The Prisoner, on CBS in 1968 and 1969, that became a cult classic that spawned fan clubs, conventions and college study.
Once described in The Times as an “espionage tale as crafted by Kafka," The Prisoner starred McGoohan as a presumed British agent who, after resigning his top-security job, is abducted in London and taken to a mysterious prison resort called the Village.
